Hundreds of people defied a last-minute cancelation of the Montreal Pride parade and marched through the city on Sunday with support from Quebec police officers, the Montreal Gazette reported. The unsanctioned event stood in stark contrast to brutal police crackdowns on unauthorized religious gatherings across Canada at the height of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Montreal Pride executive director Simon Gamache confirmed the parade’s cancelation on August 7 to the newspaper. He said the event — originally set to take place on the morning of August 7 — was short 80 staff members, most of whom were assigned to provide security for the march by cordoning off streets alongside police officers.
“That’s enormous,” Gamache said of the staff shortage, adding that “it amounted to more than one-third of the necessary staff, as around 200 volunteers were expected.”
This year’s canceled Montreal Pride parade was expected to draw tens of thousands of people to Montreal’s city center, meaning it would have required ample security for both participants and local residents.
Gamache said he and other organizers of the march chose to cancel the gathering for additional reasons, including “COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] cases during the week, multiple possible cases of heatstroke and fatigue among volunteers who had contributed in previous days.”
“Other people who said they would help hadn’t shown up for previous events,” Gamache stated.
He said this led him and other event managers “to conclude they wouldn’t be present for the parade.”
“Montreal Pride isn’t immune from human resources issues,” Gamache added.
The executive director said he and his colleagues may plan a replacement event in the near future to make up for the canceled parade.
“The Centre communautaire LGBTQ+ de Montréal sympathized with Pride’s staffing problems,” according to the Montreal Gazette.
“Everyone has been in that boat,” director Christian Tanguay told the newspaper. “It was hard for everyone, but it takes volunteers to organize all these events.
Hundreds of people planning to participate in Montreal Pride’s march decided to stage their own unofficial parade in the event’s absence on the afternoon of August 7. A number of local police officers “escorted” the marchers and helped to keep the streets they walked on clear, according to the Montreal Gazette. Some described the unofficial events as a mode of protest against the cancelation.
“We were promised a place for our voices to be heard and now it’s been taken away,” Salem Billard, who organized one of the protests, told the CBC. “We’re now living through so much violence, even going to Pride events.… And we want to take back that place as our home and not a corporate festival [event].”
The supportive actions of the Quebec police toward an unsanctioned event, which was officially canceled for its evident security threat to the city, were conspicuously opposed to the hostile attitudes that police officers across Canada have exhibited toward unauthorized religious gatherings, especially those of Christians, during pandemic lockdowns.
The Montreal Pride event had not taken place in full vigor since 2019, a result of Canada’s draconian Chinese coronavirus policies. That year, organizers faced an entirely different controversy: Montreal’s pride parade banned a group of Hong Kong gay activists who had initially received approval to march, citing alleged “security” reasons after Chinese communists threatened the group. The group, Action Free HK MTL, which supported the anti-communist protests erupting in the city that year, held a separate, unofficial rally on the same day after being uninvited.
Montreal is the largest city in eastern Canada’s francophone province of Quebec. The city has hosted pride parades in previous years, including a limited version in 2021 due to public health concerns about the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic forced the city to cancel Montreal Pride’s parade in 2020.
Montreal Pride is a term used for a week-long set of festivities that takes place in the city each year during or around the universal pride month of June. The organization’s parade is just one of several events surrounding the theme that takes place in Montreal over a period of seven days. Montreal Pride successfully organized a full slate of activities from August 1 to August 7 before it was forced to cancel its parade, which is traditionally one of the week’s final events.
“Other Pride festivities [aside from the march] went ahead as planned Sunday,” the Montreal Gazette observed on August 7.
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